road did, in fact, go somewhere, and your willingness to be luggage-free did not generate additional destinations; it just meant you had less to carry, and also that you might be stranded without a change of clothes. She thought of her son with his Gameboy, manically pressing buttons. Or Menu Column A and Menu Column B on old-fashioned Chinese menus, marriage like sweet-and-sour pork or moo shu pork or even escalating to something more gourmet like pork in black bean sauce � still just pork, which is why, at Chinese restaurants, one so often said Someone else order, even realizing that the success of the meal is in the harmony of the combinations; that marriage, like cooking, requires freshness, attention to detail, imagination.
     Probably, she thought, he had made a similar outline. She saw him in a leather chair, trying not to think of her, trying to relax by reading a computer magazine while his wife got the kids to bed. One ad trumpeted a new software program that allowed you to write your own interactive fiction. You could name the characters, choose their pasts, send them to war or outer space. You could be sociological (she's from the wrong side of the tracks) or surreal (she's a toaster oven). Then why, with so many choices, was everything so predictable?
     Because a character ordered from a Chinese menu, one trait from Column A, one from Column B, is not a person. A person is presented to you whole, immutable and unknown. You don't get to turn a person upside down and shake them to erase, as on an Etch-a-Sketch.


He was, in fact, thinking these thoughts. He was even reading the computer magazine, in the leather chair, while his sharp yet placid wife bathed the kids and shoved them, still damp, into pajamas. The list of options he had generated was remarkably similar to hers. He, too, had strained for fresh outcomes. His favorites:

• They turn on the computer at exactly the same moment to call the whole thing off in exactly the same language, thus cementing a lifelong friendship.
• They meet at the airport and are so overwhelmed by their mutual attraction that they agree to just talk � warmly, compassionately � thus cementing a lifelong friendship.

He had work allies, a squash opponent, his brother in San Diego. As it stood, however, he had to admit that pretty much his only true friend was his wife � whom he would risk losing for sex. Because sex was a story. Friendship was not a story. Okay, you had your good-cop, bad-cop buddy movies. But friendship was not news. Marriage, parenthood: not news. Sex was the only news, but talk about the same old story � paradoxes everywhere!
     In his leather chair, in his head, in the hotel room in the hub city, everything was predictable � bed, blinds, bathroom � except for her face. Soon he would be holding this face in his hands and its deep eyes would be locked on his until they closed for the kiss. A tongue is a fact, with force. Then: breast. Breast. Two new facts. Matching. He saw rather than felt his own hands, his own mouth, and knew he would be reinvented, however briefly, in his newness for her.
     In bed with TV on, thigh warm against her husband's, in her head, she stripped, unblinking. She stood before a new man naked, awaiting his hands and mouth.

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